You never want to see a client uninterested in meeting with your MSP. Yawns, glancing at the clock, shifting in their seat, all bad signs for client engagement.
But for so many MSPs working with clients who aren’t tech savvy, this is exactly the type of disengaged behavior that needs to be remedied to move the client, and the MSP, forward.
That’s why it’s so important to focus on client meetings to make sure everyone understands and is engaged, whether they’re Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) or more frequent meetings. By presenting metrics that really matter to their business goals, MSPs can lead productive conversations and leave clients satisfied.
But how do you identify what’s most important to your clients? And how do you surface that for productive conversations with clients?
It’s simple: take a proactive approach to your clients needs.
MSPs have told us that their work is much easier when client communication is clear. When you have to manage several client meetings a month, having clear and concise reports and documentation can make a big difference in engagement. MSP clients can be overwhelmed with details in reports, spreadsheets, and other documents they don’t understand. The bottom line is that they don’t understand how it relates to their needs.
By taking a proactive interest in your clients’ business goals, you can establish a new client engagement foundation that is built on the metrics, factors, and planning that answers the question, “What’s in it for me?”
For example, showing a client how an old workstation is slowing their employees productivity can help them see the real impact their IT policies are impacting business.
One of the methods of driving engagement MSPs have had success with is identifying goals and measuring progress against them. The concept of scorecards for goals can be helpful in these meetings, MSPs can outline each of the business goals their service works to support, and give updates on the progress of that item.
Through scorecards, a variety of topics can be discussed in the context of a larger goal, making the information understandable in context, rather than just going through an itemized list.
When MSPs can walk their clients through a higher level view of the metrics in context of their actual business, those clients don’t need to understand the technical aspects to get it. They can see the real revenue and expenses and make informed decisions on upcoming projects.
With an understanding of their MSPs’ work from a business perspective, clients can more effectively judge their current status, progress toward goals, and potential long-term planning.
MSPs that have leveraged Lifecycle Manager’s Scorecard and DMI features for their QBRs and other client review meetings have described scoring the progress against goals as driving motivation and engagement with clients.
Bryan Dux, Inside Sales and Contract Manager at PEI, said when clients have a tangible scorecard to evaluate their progress by,they feel more motivated to improve their performance.
“I was surprised at the amount of people that made notice or mention of it. I don’t know if it’s the gamification of things, but you start giving people scores and they wanna make it better. I think it’s very valuable for the kinds of people that look at this report,” he said.
MSPs often hear from clients that dropping a spreadsheet in their inbox a few hours before the meeting doesn’t cut it. There’s too much information and missing context to take any meaning from it before the meeting itself. So often clients enter their MSP meetings without much context.
You can avoid the information gap by creating proactive reports that cite metrics speaking to the vision your client has for the future of the organization. Much like centering the conversation around business goals, successful reporting is focused around the client’s current goals.
When the reporting is focused around an easily understandable and highly personalized set of data, clients are much more likely to engage with the discussion and feel like they are making informed decisions on topics that directly impact their success, instead of reacting to new information.
ScalePad Partners using Lifecycle Manager’s reporting feature love the visual design and accessibility of information. Having visual assets to illustrate complex ideas has had a substantial impact on gaining buy-in from clients.
Jeff Fulton, fCIO of SafetyNet, said Lifecycle Manager’s ability to automatically send reports to clients and the visual design have led clients to proactively engage with the reports even outside of the meetings.
“It was interesting because those reports — those PDFs — I will actually see them on the CEO’s desktop. Printed out along with some of our other reports because they follow them along and they’re very keen on having good intel, which is pretty neat,” he said.
Fulton has seen an uptick in CEO attendance for their QBR meetings. Fulton says it’s a big improvement as business leadership is seeing how their MSP is working toward their organizations goals and are interested in participating in the QBR.
Lifecycle Manager makes it so easy to see how IT topics relate to the business’ goals that clients are actually proactive in the meetings.
Lifecycle Manager’s automated and accurate report generation also helps clients when it comes to audits of the business. Fulton said the Lifecycle Manager report is a key part of the audit process for them.
“The ScalePad report is an artifact we send to the auditors in most cases. A question that a banking auditor is going to ask is ‘I need a copy of everything in your fleet, age and OS,’ because they are going to look at it and [see which assets still are on Windows 7]. We are providing them that level of documentation,” Fulton said.
When you understand what metrics your clients will be most interested in, MSPs client meetings can be more productive than ever. But to even get to those metrics, MSPs often have to deal with unwieldy systems to access the data and spend time creating reports.
MSPs need to nurture and develop their client relationships, which means they can’t let the process slow them down. That’s why MSPs use Lifecycle Manager as the automation foundation for client relationships.
With Lifecycle Managers’ tools and MSP support helps MSPs facilitate better collaboration with clients. MSPs can guide their clients on their business journey, becoming a vital and trusted part of their operations.
Jump into an on-demand demo walkthrough to see for yourself how you can strategize with clients more effectively than ever before.
